Eighty years after the Holocaust, when six million Jews were murdered while the world watched, including my sister and most of my mother’s family, the United Nations has released a report accusing the Jewish state of committing genocide, and the grotesque irony is impossible to ignore.
A body founded in the wake of humanity’s darkest crime now weaponizes that very word against the descendants of its victims, a people once again fighting for survival against an openly and proudly genocidal enemy.
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry’s conclusion that Israel has carried out four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention is not only baseless, it is a dangerous inversion of reality.
I have always held deep respect for the UN and its importance, but 80 years after the Holocaust in which six million of our people were murdered, to release such a toxic, unreliable, and biased report pushes even strong supporters like myself to the other side.
This report is not about truth, it is about politics, and at its base, about delegitimizing the very idea of Jewish self-defense.
The report buries the real starting point of this war, the October 7 massacre.
That day, Hamas terrorists carried out the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, murdering, raping, and torturing families in their homes, burning children alive, and abducting over two hundred and fifty hostages into Gaza. Some, starved and abused, are still there two years later.
It was not a “context” or a “background event”, it was the crime that forced Israel into a war it did not choose.
Yet in nearly two years of investigation, the commission could barely bring itself to mention it. The omission is not an oversight, it is the foundation of the report’s corruption because without erasing October 7, the charge of genocide completely collapses.
Israel’s aim from day one has been clear, to dismantle Hamas, a terrorist organization whose founding charter and daily declarations call for the extermination of Jews.
Hamas’ strategy was to embed itself in civilian neighborhoods, operate from beneath hospitals and schools, and uses Palestinian Arab children as human shields. It fires rockets from schoolyards and stockpiles weapons in mosques.
No other military in history has faced an enemy that so deliberately hides behind its own people, and yet no military in history has taken such extraordinary steps to protect civilians as the IDF. It has dropped millions of evacuation leaflets, made phone calls to households, creating humanitarian corridors, and coordinating aid deliveries, even as Hamas steals and weaponizes them.
There is so much evidence of this that was blithely ignored by those behind this “report”.
To call this genocide is obscene. Genocide is what the Nazis did to the Jews, what the Ottomans did to the Armenians, what the Hutu militias did to the Tutsi. It is the systematic extermination of a people because of who they are.
Israel, by contrast, is fighting for its survival against an enemy sworn to its destruction, while taking steps that often put its own soldiers in greater danger to spare civilians. To equate this with genocide is not just a lie, it is a desecration of the memory of real genocides.
The commission’s bias is not new.
The UN Human Rights Council is the only body on earth with a permanent agenda item singling out one country, the one Jewish state.
Navi Pillay, the chair of this commission, has consistently been accused of antisemitism, an obsession with Israel and seemingly aligned herself with its enemies. Another member, Miloon Kothari, has remonstrated against a “Jewish Lobby” which controls social media, and the third, Chris Sidoti, has trivialized antisemitism.
That all three commissioners announced their resignations before releasing this sweeping indictment is extremely telling and only underlines their lack of accountability. They will never have to answer for the damage their words will cause.
The consequences of this distortion are not academic. When the report calls on states to halt arms transfers to Israel, it is calling for Israel to be stripped of the means to protect its citizens from rockets, drones, and tunnels.
When it urges prosecutions of Israel’s leaders, it is seeking to criminalize the very act of Jewish self-defense. This is not justice, it is surrender to terrorism dressed up as international law.
What makes this all the more shameful is that it plays directly into Hamas’ hands. By laundering Hamas propaganda through the UN, the commission emboldens terrorists, tells them that hiding behind civilians is an effective strategy, and reassures them that the world will hold Israel responsible for Hamas’s crimes. The report does not bring us closer to peace; it makes peace harder by rewarding those who thrive on violence and martyrdom.
The international community should reject this farce with the contempt it deserves. Democracies that value truth, justice, and the right of self-defense must not allow the gravest crime in international law to be trivialized and weaponized.
History will not forgive a world that stood silent while lies replaced facts and terrorists replaced victims.
The UN had a chance to defend the integrity of justice. Instead, it has tarnished it. The Jewish people will continue to fight for survival, for freedom, and for truth, just as we have always done, and we will not be lectured on genocide by those who ignored it when it truly mattered.
Robert Singer is the chairman of the Center for Jewish impact (CJI) and former CEO of the World Jewish Congress, and World ORT.